SECRET SKY

Forgive me, dear Reader, for using chaos. Fertility lies in unexpected places.

I.

Secret sky, mother of secrets, Moon wombed, the Sun a fierce dog on a hot farm.

Joyous sky, friend of my days, lover of my skin; but you are burdened by knowing unshared (burdened or buoyed) and by wounds unhealed.

In your blueness you answer nothing; and your blueness, when we want to touch a thing, turns out to be infinite. It is easy to be touched by infinity; but impossible to touch it.

Your clouds.

Ships slip through waves, ship and wave feeding itself, laden with questions unexpressed, answers like water, never grasped. But sensed, as water thinks, flowing by, sensed as these clouds swell and slip, the unspeaking Moon herding dreams carried by virginal bellies pierced in waves by virginal trains, white, in our deepest cynicism we are wedded to this old sky, virgins to this old sky, I remember gold skies of my childhood, hysterical

skies, unfurling skies and frozen skies hard as steel skies writhing in the torture of their own beauty — or God do you ever answer except with — how small, limp the word beauty is — except with scratches? Never answer! We built churches only to find adoration is its own exquisite failure, and the tiny self-torture of priests and penises.

II.

We lie on this hill with this woman, I and these two friends below, waiting. We are waiting for an extremely important conversation to arrive. We scan the tidy fields, careful but abandoned, wide ditches carefully laid by quiet men, all serene, empty. We are waiting for the arms the embrace of a pick-up, a bus or train or plane (it could land on the drugged fields) to be familiar. These two friends, I don’t know their names or thoughts. I touch the woman’s shoulder, diffidently. She stirs slightly or does she? She like everyone is God but I am unable to claim passion. One of us says “The coroners are missing.” A wind sighs inside me, hollowing me. I realize the day is dead and empty. Where have the explainers fled? For how long? I pull a string from the earth and it says: “Liar.” Why do the clouds fold within like a physics demonstration? Fold and fold like marbled morals. Are we in Dover? Is this my childhood? If dreams trump logic, logic is just another dream; worse, it denies itself. Denies its parent, that bellied man who huffed and whacked his way through a jungle of rituals to clear the thighs and plant his corn, the copia of seed burnt Aztecs shouted, raged and wailed and finally flung against the gods who tore them limb from limb who stripped the muscles red, pulsing, from their screaming thighs: the seabirds swirl in Dover, crying in French, announcing the ships of regret.

On their hulls (swollen bellied) (as they float rotting in harbour) incomprehensible

scratches from forgotten battles, hieroglyphics of tales no one remembered to tell, in languages lost. Languages that were just a dream, after all. Even these are more revealing than you, secret sky.

These scratches, warm now, dry now in the sea-scent sun — answers once? Questions, once? Q & A surrounded by a dream, attacked by sciences of fantasy, by armies of opinion-mongers, crumpled noses smearing the glass of God’s exclusion.

This woman (blonde, slim, mascara, watchable) I see the everyday cotton of her white sleeve, folded by a shift of her arm — will I love you after time > forever, or will I lie bored, waiting for you to leave? White fabric twisted gently like the clouds above, swelled by an indeterminate breast; in my second mind, freight trains of desire rush, thump, thrum, thump, thrum, thump. We wait, us four, for a bus, or train, or boat; we need to leave for home, find home > where, we once thought in dreaming youth, nothing lurked. I cannot miss this bus, or plane or boat, I fear aloneness in this perfect place of, but I must run back into the pension, to find myself, rank and mad in the mirror, to brush my teeth and wash my armpits for this watchable woman. Inside the cold walls I race, panicked, unable to locate toothpaste or soap, the sink is smaller than my head, panic shrills the seconds.

Stilled, outside, lying elbowed on the grassy hill under the cold implacable sky and the welcoming implacable sky. In everything implacable! Implacable as swords! Sharp as insults! Hard as edges striking thighs! As stones smashed into eyes! As cold eyes striking uncertain boys! Boys whose large eyes judge in — judge in — silence, God — You who are judged for your silence by the thousands billions trillions (for we include spiders and emus) who, even being instruments, do not know it, and judge without knowledge. Judgements are only party favours, crepe torn loose from festive walls by the wind, blown in splatting sail, starved-flat snakes twisting in puppet convulsions of celebration, folding sail, to finally die, exhausted, on the stubble-cheeked sidewalk. But perhaps they are correct judgements! Correct! In these clear mists, what is correct? Correct! Sidewalks, do they dream? Do they seek direction? As the black crepe sighs onto the cheek of its lover cement, trembling with desire to die in ecstasy, seeking the oblivion of judgement, does it seek answers too? Or is the crepe red as as penis? God, are You a sidewalk > a sky > a rock > are You a direction?

Or are you directed by a thousand venal priests, penises disdainfully conquering reverence?

III.

The man who, suddenly on an afternoon, walking with his wife, is crazed by the intense beauty of all other women, this woman near the olive barrels, with voyages in her eyes; this one, plucking tomatoes, with archetypes layered playing like violins in her smile (what regrets, tragedies and stale bedrooms, what losses and sadness make that inviting, wounded smile a twinkling of mysteries?); this one passing in the aisle conscious of his averted stare whose averted stare speaks of a censored message and maybe a return but drifting also away on a sea-song of lust clean and white as a wave breaking or a branch’s flesh new-whittled by the boy’s penknife, white before it browns from no other sin than age;

In each face he sees a perfect future as if choices were like cards, each a picture of an event never lived, but never meant to be lived again, or before — to live again like a cool ember blown on, a first hint of birth, swelled female belly mouthing angels’ thoughts; he takes his child lovingly in his cathedral arms;

All futures are ships on an ocean, on clouds: suddenly, like shrill visions, a silver ship parts the hysterical sky, drops like an ejaculation from the madness above; it lands on the gravel at the drive-in movie, hidden beside the concession stand; carried, the boy faints in a monster’s arms. Silver tables and silver implements and silver silence. He returns, eating popcorn; popcorn pops and spews from his belly; (there is no period because nothing ever ends) (no adjustment ever un-adjusts; everything grows beyond its time) (no bent twig straightens) (no minuscule moment of molestation ever disappears; it grows like fungus through every sequential moment, year, flesh, growing flesh, love and black inspirations plague the boy, until his cock spews weak, sadly, unendingly weighting his flight into manhood, into future, felled by air things, his heart staked like a watchdog at the gate of desire; like a round bowl turning on itself, hungering after its own emptiness. Or, worse but easier, softer, a kind of love, eating others to make them hungry.

IV.

Oh. How. Does. One. Know. Act. To act is knowing, the only knowing. I am paralyzed by the prospect of knowing the watchable woman and by not knowing. Do you want me? I hurl such questions at you now, enraged by my paralysis, wind rising, joying in rage — dumb with dumbfounded-ness or dumb with shock or dumb with acceptance and further dumbed by convention, you do not answer.

Is there another escape? To burrow beneath our sense, your unspeaking statements, my ranting sense, is truth there somewhere? Below?

Sky, mother of my childhood, canvas of my fantasies, cold rejecter of my maturity, is the earth any wiser? Any comfort? It’s possible all herein is mine.

She stood in the doorway. His life, every memory, died.

V.

The moon’s mad eye pushes through my nights. This week a wink, this one a stare.

Don’t you think I know what you are doing, you harvester of dreams, plowing the sky planting madness and reaping the weeping joys, lighting young men’s heads (jack-o-lanterns) with the crazy swell of breasts and the succulent swells of bellies, girls with seeds of cities — all for nothing. As you wander through that secret sky, pushing clouds with your staring eye-dignity, do you whisper to Him, does he share tidbits with you? And these girls who pour forth future cities and arrange them in their hands, do you share with them, deep, bits of his whispers — does it gossip, this sky? When it hides behind those tiding clouds, does it utter breathless tales of sins and embarrassment? Only you would know.

VI.

The horizon shifts with childhood memories unlisted in my ledgers, incongruous nuances, whispers of sense slowly turning like dumb acrobats, but when the bright small moment of revelation fades, so does the sense, to drift like wisps over the fields, an evening fog dressing the sweet damp fields, dewed as if sheets for God, a night with God, the bright Moon shearing the dark, a wedding trail. Into this the hawk of accusation dives, whether to conquer or disappear doesn’t matter; that the accusation is made, a shrill thing: only the thing. That anything exists, even for a second: that’s everything; though the next second needs another. These happy women, they clutch in their preying beaks the scavenged truth. All truth is old. Only lies are shiny and fresh; invention outweighs existence, and the invention becomes itself. The Sun is black, and bombs implode: the future’s horizon is only the past (re-jumbled?). Is this why you won’t answer me, because even the question has never made sense, no, the question has never been discovered, not by man: is there a sense beyond, that we can only scratch at, like the scratches on the boats made by fishes’ fingernails? What were they clutching at? Escape? Deliverance? Congress? Coitus? You, sweet fogged farmed field, what is your question? Or are you struck dumb by your own beauty? (The Moon strokes your furrows with its lascivious light, that fat whore, smug in her grace.)

VII.

In the eye of the bird, eagle, hawk,

Sky and vision ring with silent tufts like the quick little slap of death or

Violent wisdom crashing into implacable windows;

In the blank eye emotions round and perfect: polished mirrors, mirrors don’t have to feel: intelligence high above my feverish grunts and queries. The Sun is your lover, brave birds; the Moon is mine.

Felled by air things, abandoned (or incarcerated) by my loins,

My heart staked like a watchdog at the gates of Desire; like a bowl turning on itself, eating its own emptiness.

Or the bowl of her lips o’d with scarlet hesitancy, hungry with curiosity, but

Hesitant to ring

my pungent plow;

or let it furrow her honey-weeping thigh-brow.

But fuck is easy, safety is not. In the social, the heart, the opinions, the options, the words, the stances, the air, the soul:

Her perfect expectations deny entry to the long hallways of her delicate house,

The hollow bones of her flight, powerful slow wings fusing nuance.

Will my dog nails click on her halled floors, will my black throat howl in her bowelled basement? Or sit, student, in her school of misty morals?

Nature, are you ashamed of the bush, the grass, the flower? Why then do you cast us in shame? (Why do you grow priests to make us guilty? Did God want priests? Or did priests want god?)

We are born in you; we die in you; we are your genius; at our height we cannot match the bird’s eye.

You are responsible: Answer.

Answer.

VIII.

I lie, elbowed on the grass bank beside the watchable woman, waiting, teeth unbrushed; I wait for everything I do; to end. So I do; nothing.

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